How @BoredElonMusk Attracted 1.7 mn followers on Twitter

tech.hindustantimes.com:

Pseudonymity will be an inevitable work trend over the next decade.

I realized this while interviewing a popular pseudonymous Twitter account: @BoredElonMusk, whose musings on tech and wild startup ideas that the real Elon Muskmight invent (like a “food truck ferris wheel”) have attracted 1.7 million followers.

The person behind the account also goes by the name “Bored” and started the parody account in 2013.

During our Zoom call, Bored used his real voice but the face I saw was a floating — and expressive — avatar of his Twitter profile picture. The call highlighted for me the key fact that pseudonymity is not anonymity.

Coinbase Global Inc.’s former chief technology officer Balaji Srinivasan coined the term “pseudonymous economy” and explains the difference:

A pseudonym is a persistent name like [a Reddit user]. An anonym is like a [4Chan user] where there is no tracing across interactions. A pseudonym can crucially have reputation and metadata associated with it. An [anonymous user] is not persistent at all.

For Bored, persistence and reputation are very important. He is an active angel investor and just launched a crypto gaming company (Bored Box). If Bored’s Twitter account made outrageously off-brand statements, he could lose nine years of reputation building and hurt his businesses.

“I’m pseudonymous but I’m still accountable for my actions,” Bored says. “The difference is that my ventures are mostly judged for those actions, not for where I live or what degrees I have or what I look like.”

Put another way: Pseudonymity is a potential tonic for rampant credentialism and allows merit to win out. This idea is not new. The young Benjamin Franklin famously wrote under the guise of a middle-aged widow named Silence Dogood.